What was the relationship between national character, government, and civilization for James Mill? This article answers this question by focusing on Indian and British national characters. For Mill, Indian national character was unsuited to trigger the progress of civilization. He questioned how a society with a flawed character could be led toward improvement. This article underlines the importance of human agency for the progress of civilization in Mill’s thought. In order to cause progress, individuals had to voluntarily guide society toward improvement by embracing the principle of utility. Governmental action should create the conditions necessary to bring about individuals of suitable character. Members of the middle class could foster progress better than those of any other class. They could oppose the despotism of the aristocracy and be the driving force of civilization by voluntarily shaping their ideas in accordance with the public good.

This article offers a four-part argument in favor of settlers adopting an ethics of recognition in negotiations with Indigenous peoples to support decolonization in North America. Part 1 examines theories of decolonization offered by Indigenous scholars, who show that ethical practices within Indigenous communities are necessary for decolonization. Part 2 focuses on James Tully’s revision of the liberal politics of recognition (LPR), arguing that Tully brings the LPR closer to the aims of decolonization. Part 3 argues that his innovations do not sufficiently acknowledge how inequality undermines the freedom he champions. Part 4 draws on Judith Butler’s interpretation of Hegelian recognition and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s idea of recognition to sketch an ethics that minimizes the inequalities of participants in the political negotiations Tully theorizes. Minimizing inequality will promote the greater freedom needed for the legitimacy of negotiations, making them a possible vehicle for decolonization.

True to his pathbreaking and imaginative scholarship, David Armitage has discovered a rich fabric of connections between opera and international law — links that have been largely overlooked by previous scholars. By reading Beaumarchais and Mozart alongside Abraham Wicquefort and other contemporary sources on ambassadorial practice, he brings out some of the implications of his historical and sociological argument that opera was born not only with the modern state, as has long been argued, but also with modern interstate relations and the law of nations. He makes a powerful case for the affinities between opera and international law, recapturing not just the broad interest both held at the time among political elites, but also their disruptive and even revolutionary possibilities.

David Armitage’s idea of reading The Marriage of Figaro in the context of international law and diplomacy is extremely fruitful for understanding this opera in its original historical context and in our present world. Opera, especially this one, is still part of our culture, as it is performed every year, and as such, it is a trans-historical and trans-national work-event, occupying a liminal zone between a text produced in a specific historical context and event reoccurring time and again in ever-changing performance practice. There is no shortage of great operas composed in the eighteenth century, including some by Mozart, which have entirely or nearly disappeared from the active repertory. The Marriage of Figaro is still present not only because of the undisputable beauty of its music but also because it continues to appeal to our sensibility by dramatizing interpersonal tensions and resolutions that persist today.

In his second lecture about opera’s relationship with international law, David Armitage recalls Wagner’s quasi-origin story for Der fliegende Holländer (1843): the composer’s own stormy sea voyage from East Prussia to Paris via London and Norway in the summer of 1939. Although Wagner had already planned to transform the legend of the eternally doomed ghost ship into an opera, he insisted that his journey gave his ideas a characteristic musical-poetic coloring. For Armitage, this coloring had less to do with the Schauer (dark)-romanticism of the craggy Norwegian fjords than with Wagner’s experience of the sea as a space of legal exceptionalism and the ship as a vector of law in an ocean of lawlessness. On the run from his Baltic creditors, Wagner had crossed the East Prussian border illegally. According to Armitage, the journey lent both documentary and autobiographical significance to the action, redirecting emphasis from romantic and gothic visions of the sea towards its legal significance.

In a 1950 essay, Heinz Politzer provided an on-the-spot evaluation of Menotti’s opera The Consul, which had debuted that year, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City. As a Kafka scholar, and a Jewish refugee from Vienna who naturalized as a US citizen, Politzer possessed strong credentials for assessing the opera’s portrayal of the tyranny of modern border control. His essay affirmed one of the central claims of David Armitage’s final Niemeyer lecture, “Refugee Songs,” that The Consul acutely illuminates the plight of the modern refugee, and thus provides a striking example of opera’s long-standing preoccupation with individuals caught up in international rules. According to Politzer, Menotti “has an authentic modern subject … worthy of serious treatment, and capable of evoking authentic emotion … the action is contemporary: we have lived through it … the struggle for a visa to the land of freedom, good life, redemption.”1

This is a fascinating project, and I have learned a great deal about Mozart from Armitage’s Lecture I and about recent operas in Lecture III’s general introduction and the detailed discussion of The Consul. I make two minor criticisms and then broaden the topic by thinking of what I shall term “internal exile”—deprivation of rights and full citizenship that happens to some groups of people within the borders of a state, although nominally they are citizens thereof. This is a rich theme for operas, past and present. And at least some of these exiles triumph over rules.

Sebell’s book provides an intense and insightful commentary on Memorabilia 4, built around the thesis that Xenophon’s central goal is to point good readers toward the theological solution to the problem of politics. That thesis is not overt in the Memorabilia itself, so the bulk of Sebell’s book is devoted to showing how better sorts of readers benefit from thinking through arguments originally addressed to a decidedly limited Socratic interlocutor, Euthydemos. But Sebell’s book is not easy. His sentences are sometimes labyrinthine in their complexity. And as someone Sebell would call, reasonably enough, a conventional classicist, my difficulties in following his argument are larger.

Dustin Sebell has written an excellent book on Xenophon—the most thorough and comprehensive account of Book IV of the Memorabilia known to me. He develops his argument powerfully, rigorously, and his conclusions about the character, methods and goals of the Socratic education are compelling. Book IV has often been described—not without reason—as dull and insipid. Sebell succeeds in showing, however, that while Socrates’s education of the young Euthydemos is indeed a caricature, a careful reader can discover through that caricature the core of the Socratic education. In my view, the most important contribution of the book is to offer a masterful explanation of how and why Socrates often chose to educate good natures indirectly, not through dialogue but by making them the silent witnesses of the “education” of youths who could not be truly enlightened. By revealing his thought “with a view to” Euthydemos—the ungifted pupil of Memorabilia IV—Socrates was simultaneously able to adumbrate his genuine thoughts to good natures (36). And Sebell explains convincingly the reasons for Socrates’s indirect pedagogy.

Sebell’s book offers a modest surface concealing a profound interior. Promising to examine a small portion of one work of Xenophon (Memorabilia 4.1–7), a portion that presents a seemingly dumbed-down education of Euthydemos, a less-than-promising youth, Sebell opens up that education to an altogether more comprehensive, genuinely Socratic one. As his title indicates, Sebell, through his remarkable and thorough analysis of this apparently half-baked education, reveals the education that Xenophon himself received, albeit indirectly (as all we readers perforce must do), from Socrates. As he suggests, insofar as the Memorabilia is Xenophon’s “most defensive or apologetic” Socratic work, it would “make sense for it also, in places, to be his most daring” (p. 16). Moreover, as his subtitle indicates, Sebell’s study promises a consideration of the fundamental question or questions of political philosophy: To what extent can politics be guided by reason? To what extent by religion? Do their respective modes of guidance somehow “limit” politics? Can they align or does the quarrel between the two itself somehow limit politics? And why does Sebell speak (in his subtitle) of the limits only of politics? As we discover in the course of his study, there might appear to be limits to both reason and religion as well, not least in their apparent inability to refute one another (Sebell insists Socrates acknowledges “the very real possibility of superhuman wisdom”; p. 203, n. 29).